Broda Jr., Dale: The Old Warrior (2010)

I’ve been wondering for ages what being a soldier for years upon years would do to a person. That is a soldier who is out fighting all the time. It would have to be the close-up kind of soldier who has to make life and death decisions for another person on a regular basis. What would that do to you, and how many of your choices would you find bearing you down?

War is a terrible thing. The Old Warriorhas been trained for a life of killing since childhood by people who treated him roughly. His choices have numbed him to the horrors he is part of. In the end that life is catching up with him, but then …

“The Nightmare” appears in the form of a little girl who has lost her mom and dad and wolf to the killers around her. She stands there in the middle of the noise and gore with an empty look on her face. “The Nightmare”. The one who manages to break through to the old warrior and create a chink in his suit of denial.

The Old Warrior was a sad and action-filled story. It ended differently from how I had expected and that annoyed me. But I also find it refreshing (and annoying – did I mention that) when closure is not reached. But life is like that. We cannot always know how things end.

Santa is Dead

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Man by Steve Cotts

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.